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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker)
Subject: Re: Letter From Ted Nelson
Message-ID: <hbaker-1406950011580001@192.0.2.1>
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References: <3r29km$m7p@crl11.crl.com> <3r4kpr$q9q@crl4.crl.com> <hbaker-0706951720170001@192.0.2.1> <3r7jqd$ihb@crl7.crl.com> <DA4vtK.5Dw@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <RMZ.95Jun14061704@solva.ifi.uio.no>
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Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 08:11:58 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.lisp:18133 comp.lang.icon:3166

In article <RMZ.95Jun14061704@solva.ifi.uio.no>, rmz@ifi.uio.no (Bjrn
Remseth) wrote:

> >To tie this back to the subject of this thread.  It does not matter
> >how many great ideas Ted Nelson has come up with.  If these ideas
> >are not incorporated into the systems we use,  then they are of
> >little value.  In the future some scholar may make a list of
> >somebodies work and say they actually discovered X,Y and Z, but
> >for those caught up in normal life the issue is pragmatic. What
> >ideas are avilible for use and who makes them availible?
> 
>            No-one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to
>            be served by the theory of numbers or relativity,
>            and it seems very unlikely that anyone will do so 
>            for many years
>                                     G.H. Hardy
>                             in "A mathematician's apology" 1940

(Wonderful quotation!  Of course, number theory is now used for very
good encryption schemes, and relativity told us about E=mc^2 for computing
the upper limit of the power in an atomic bomb.)

------

Steven Majewski sdm7g@virginia.edu:
> Or, to quote Steve Jobs' mantra ( when pushing the Mac development
> team, as quoted in Steve Levy's _Insanely_Great_ ) : "Artists Ship!" 

Of course this quote of Steve Jobs is _very_ wrong.  It takes time -- sometimes
quite a lot of time -- before the unthinkable gradually becomes the obvious.
During that time, one can waste huge amounts of one's own time and other
people's money trying to force the future.  Shipping product isn't the problem,
but getting people to buy is.  The business world is littered with the carcasses
of those who were right, but too early.

Steve Jobs grabbed an opportunity that Xerox/DEC/etc. fumbled.  That makes him a
keen businessman, but hardly the innovative artistic thinker that would have
come up with the Smalltalk/Alto/... 10-15 years earlier.

If you really think that Cyberspace would have happened without visionaries
like Ted Nelson, you're very naive about how hard it is to come up with a
truly novel thought.

The whole point of culture and progress is to allow the next generation to
avoid making all the mistakes of the past and to provide the conceptual
framework (Weltenschaung (sp??)) for seeing the world with new eyes.  This
is not to take anything away from the cleverness of the new generation, but
the new generation has no business belittling the cleverness of the generation
that provided them with this framework which now makes everything obvious.

Methinks you take too much for granted...

-- 
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